"The women of Bikini Kill let guitarist Billy Karren be in their feminist punk band, but only if he's willing to just "do some shit." Being a feminist dude is like that. We may ask you to "do some shit" for the band, but you don't get to be Kathleen Hannah."--@heatherurehere

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

The Whole Feminist Guy Thing

So I get an email the other day from a person I don't know. No, he wasn't offering penis enlargement or a great deal on a mortgage. He contacted me because he had read something I wrote/posted/commented on somewhere about being a feminist guy, and of the intricacies of such things, and he thought maybe we could bounce some ideas off of each other.

Since I've sort of been putting myself out there over the past few months in the 'pro-feminist' men's community (such as it is), this has happened a couple of times. Each time, we express how there seems to be a dearth of options for feminist men who want to talk about their relatively unique experience of being men who consider themselves feminists in a culture which doesn't give them much room to be feminists.

I'm not sure what I have in mind for this group blog, but it was clear that there are at least a few men out there besides myself who are struggling with some of the issues surrounding being feminist men, and heck, it's 2006, so what better way to do so then to blog about it?

Sure, I'm the only one on the blog at present, but more are coming up, soon! (And anybody who would like to join the blog, send a note to jeff @ speakeasy dot net.)